Virtual Methodist

There’s an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the earth:   A right time for birth and another for death, A right time to plant and another to reap, A right time to kill and another to heal, A right time to destroy and another to construct, A right time to cry and another to laugh, A right time to lament and another to cheer, A right time to make love and another to abstain, A right time to embrace and another to part, A right time to search and another to count your losses, A right time to hold on and another to let go, A right time to rip out and another to mend, A right time to shut up and another to speak up, A right time to love and another to hate, A right time to wage war and another to make peace. Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8   We'll it's almost a month on from my last blog post... and a number of people recently have asked why I have stopped posting so regularly? Frankly it has been a question of time... I haven't had enough of it to do...

Have been off the blog for quite a wee while now, and it seems like others have been shaking off the blogging bug in my absence (including the always stimulating Zoomtard). However, my absence has been due to a combination of technical problems and life/work balance, but things are beginning to even out again and (at present) my intention is to carry on. I could well be posting into a virtual vacuum given that I have been away so long, but never mind... 90% of my blogging has always been about personal therapy anyway. After such an absence I've got a number of pieces that are likely to come thick and fast now, largely prompted by reading and viewing experiences over the past 2-3 months. I've just posted a review of the first of my holiday reading on Goodreads/Facebook, "The Fort" by Bernand Cornwell (of "Sharpe" fame). At first glance this wouldn't seem to be the most profound of books (ideal holiday reading) but tomorrow I'll be expanding on th...

Well, it's been a while... Haven't been blogging much for a combination of reasons... First I was quite busy last week in a way I haven't been for months. Then, this week, I have been feeling a bit down again and just haven't had the mental energy for much more than crawling out of bed (just call me yoyo man). And finally, I've been doing a bit of thinking about the motivations for, wisdom and etiquette of blogging, prompted by a couple of events and conversations... First, a friend of a friend found herself seriously burned by the print media because of a blog she had been writing... no names, as I don't want to play by the same appalling sensationalist rules the papers do... Essentially she'd been writing a blog based on her life against the background of the current economic ills. It had recieved a little attention in the Sunday Times business section last November, but last week the Guardian/Telegraph/Mail and Express (and probably a few others that I ha...

As the year hurtles towards its conclusion, its the season of award shows and so I thought I would round it off with my own special VM Awards - an assortment of plaudits regarding some of the other offerings out there in the virtual world - the winners get nothing except my admiration and adulation... Favourite Methodist Blog: Given that I call this blog Virtual Methodist, I felt duty bound to include this category. In terms of Irish Methodist's there aren't too many consistent bloggers out there (they've probably all moved over to twitter now, leaving dinosaurs like me behind) although Paul Ritchie continues to write "To Whom it may Concern". But extending my view beyond these shores, it will be no surprise to those who have noted the number of links to (and lifts from) it that I would see Connexions as the most consistently interesting (and eclectic) Methodist blog out there... Richard/Kim et al are also one of the few who churn out more stuff than I do... Nev...

I've been back from my summer travels for a wee while now and back at work for a few days, but I've had a lot to clear up both personally (I'll rant about that in due course) and in terms of the usual backlog of emails and paper, so I have hardly looked at the blog in ages... So I thought I would dip my foot in the water by sharing a few interesting links that I've come across in recent days... Some I've already posted on FB, but most of them demand more attention than I ever give to something over there. Most are of a theological bent, but some touch on my other diverse interests. On the theological front, Patrick Mitchel picks up on Ben Myers thoughts regarding theology in the blogosphere and applies them to denominational theology in Ireland. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Meanwhile, Karen Spears Zacharias (don't know if she's a relation of Ravi) has written an interesting piece on the hoary old subject of militarism and nationalism in A...

Rarely in the time that I've been blogging, and even before that when I was merely a spectator in this weird and wonderful virtual world, has one subject so dominated the blogsphere for so long a time... Haiti... I posted my own semi-coherent rant last week prompted by Pat Robertson's nonsense... But one week on from the disaster the flow of words continues... So I thought I'd just point you in the direction of some of the more interesting ones I have come across... You might have already seen them, but maybe not... Going back to Pat Robertson's pronouncements on Haiti's pact with the Devil, well that has been both refuted and nuanced in great detail (according to Franklin Graham he "miss-spoke"), but for my money the best response came from the pages of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, which posted a "Letter from Satan" . A more cerebral response was the BBC's "Why does God allow natural disasters?" where they unleashed tame...

In a truly momentous week, what has tickled my fancy in the blogosphere? Regarding the big news story (something about a new President of the USA incase you missed it) the blog that summed up the momentous nature of it all was Crookedshore's identification of the quote of the night. McCain's gracious concession speech and the inspiring words of Obama's acceptance, also caught the imagination of Crookedshore and others. William Crawley has posted the full text and visuals of the latter here. This is also the first week of NaBloPoMo 2008, or National Blog Posting Month, for the uninitiated, and a lot of the posting has been to do with the presidential campaign, but Marramgrass , who introduced me to the whole NaBloPoMo thang has to get the prize for one of the most feeble first posts.... But at least he admits it! Of course we're now rapidly heading towards season of Winterval, or whatever the loony leftwing halfwits want to call it this year, and the resultant waves of i...

Fathers, do not exasperate your children... Ephesians 6:4 Well… that is yet another Biblical command I have broken… This week I noticed that the number of unique hits on my blog had suddenly increased. That was unusual since I had been at conference last week and hadn’t been posting anything regularly… I will post a few reflections on the conference over the next few days, but I’ve been too busy until now… So I was a bit surprised to see so many new visitors in such a short period of time. Then last night my poor, long suffering, eldest son, Owain, informed me that someone in his class had stumbled on my blog when googling the names of other members of his class, and, having found various references to Owain, had promptly circulated them around the whole class… So, at least temporarily my average hit rate is up, but the average age of my readers is way, way down… But it made me rethink the reason I blog… There is no doubt that part of it was originally a cut-price, electronic form of ...